What's Coming Up on Charting Futures
In April I appear on the UK's biggest investing podcast
If this is your first time here, hi, I’m Tom. I’m a financial writer, researcher and sometimes a journalist. Welcome.
On Thursday 14 March 2024, I took a trip down to London town to appear as a guest on a video podcast called ‘Making Money’.
The above picture is of me with the hosts, under bright lights, in a terraced house in Kendal Town, where the interview took place.
My appearance was to talk about crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the pitfalls and benefits of investing in new and disruptive technology.
Making Money is one of the UK’s biggest investing podcasts. Some serious guests have appeared on it, including Deborah Meaden from Dragon’s Den; the income inequality campaigner Garys [sic] Economics, author of The Trading Game; Ali Abdal, who has 5 million Youtube subscribers; and Ramin Nakisa, the ex-banker who now runs PensionCraft.
And now me.
The show is hosted by Damien Jordan and his best mate Timeyin Akarele. Damien has over 175,000 subscribers to his main channel, DamienTalksMoney. I found them to be brilliant lads, super interested in crypto and business and finance and democratising access to knowledge.
I am a much better writer than I am a public speaker. Usually, it’s me asking thorny questions while my interviewee squirms a bit. I am terrified that in the moment, I panicked and said something:
Libellous
Misunderstood, misremembered, or otherwise patently inaccurate
Slightly *too* honest
I’m told there will be short clips put out on TikTok, Youtube and Instagram (none of which I use, for fear of having yet another scrolling addiction and never reading another book) as well as the main interview being put out on Damien’s Making Money channel.
I can’t go back and edit any of what will exist. Clips of me sounding either super smart — or catastrophically dumb — will live somewhere on the internet forever, out of my control.
However.
It’s a good opportunity to introduce new readers to Charting Futures.
I have a truckload of interesting articles, data pieces, and other fun stuff in the works.
The episode goes live on or around 1 April 2024. I know. April Fool’s Day for crypto. You couldn’t make it up.
So I’m setting out the Charting Futures content schedule going forward.
There will be a post for all free subscribers on Charting Futures every Friday at noon (GMT/BST). I will sprinkle in extra content here and there depending on what I’m researching at the time, or if I have something additional I can’t wait until Friday to share.
If this newsletter starts to get a bit of traction, I’d like to add an additional piece every Tuesday for people who want to learn more about the history of technology, and blockchain or cryptocurrency.
Pieces I’m writing for that Crypto/Tech Strand include
A Normal Person’s Guide to Tokenised Money
Which Law Enforcement Agencies Hold The Most Bitcoin?
Open Source: A Single Computer Program Saved My Life — I Just Wish It Wasn’t Called GIMP
The Case Against Blockchains: The Damaging Effects of Organising Communities by Financial Incentive
Block Party: Why the UK is Way Ahead on Crypto Law (and Left in the Dust on Policy)
Game Theory: What Rubik’s Cubes and Solitaire Tell Us About How to Win
For this series I’ll mostly try to interview academics, researchers and all the awesome nerds I’ve made friends with in my career.
For now, you’ll see a free article from me every Friday.
I’ll try at the very least to make each one entertaining, surprising, or thought-provoking. Some may attempt to look seriously at economics, philosophy, art or other forms of human progress. Some may be shallow, or just funny and daft. Because we contain multitudes. And I like making charts.
Friday 29 March 2024: Open Book #1
This is a trial of a series looking at what readers are actually investing in. The first subject is me: because how can I invite anyone to open up, if I can’t do it myself?
I’ll look at which stocks and shares I own, and the industries, sectors and themes I follow.
My thought is to give an approximate total valuation of portfolios, just so readers can get a general sense of where the contributor is in their investing journey, without needlessly giving away personal information.
These might fit most easily under
Three Figures
Four Figures
Five Figures
Six Figures
There is so much obfuscation and sleight of hand around investing, that so few people ever get to know what their friends, family, neighbours or peers think about markets or how we engage in them to chart potential futures.
I’ll see how popular this series is, and how people engage with it, before deciding on regularity.
Friday 5 April 2024: Chart Club #1
Investigating Five Thirty Eight, the US politics polling site with some of the best data visualisation on the planet.
In this series I’ll be recreating data charts from the likes of The Economist, Visual Capitalist, Flipside Crypto and other data visualisers, as well as looking at software for producing graphs and charts (of which there are a dizzying number).
These include Google Sheets, Tableau, Power BI, Powerpoint, Canva, Figma, Flourish Studio, GIMP, Datawrapper etc.
I’ll look at colour theory, the human eye and information processing, and pick out the best abstract representations I’ve ever come across.
I’d also like to open out this to reader suggestions.
I’ll also see how popular this series is, and how people engage with it, before deciding on regularity.
Friday 12 April 2024: The 3 Most Influential Money Ideas of the Last 100 years
The Journal of Finance is probably the most respected financial journal (duh) on the planet. So I’ve scoured through the lists of thousands of articles to find out which are the most cited — and therefore most influential — ideas of the last 100 years.
The most influential money idea of the last century only appeared 25 years ago. And it was a bit of a shock to discover.
Friday 19 April 2024: A History of Panics, Crises, Bull Markets and Bear Markets
The immediacy of a panic or market crisis brings out the worst in everyone: with emotions heightened to fever pitch. But how often do they really occur? Are we in a bull market now? Or a bear market? And what do those things even mean?
We’ll look back at a selection of crises from 1800 to 2024, including crypto bull and bear markets.
Friday 26 April 2024: The Insane Story of the Spy Who Collapsed A Currency (And Invented The Bar Chart)
I’m really excited about this one. I want to give myself enough time to write and edit it properly. Discovering William Playfair was one of the driving forces being starting Charting Futures in the first place.
Our story begins on a side-street coffeehouse in Paris in 1787, just two years before the start of the French Revolution.
We’ll take a tour through income inequality, the Gini co-efficient, and how some of the world’s biggest scientific breakthroughs were funded by brutal oppression and taxation.
End Creditors
I want to give a shout out to my sister Lisa Rodgers (full research profile here) who just published Labour Law and the Person: An Agenda for Social Justice.
I was looking around my bookshelves the other day, and the thought struck me: can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to own thousands of books, and not have written a single one yourself?
The first book I ever saw written by a family member was Moontan, a slight but fascinating 1996 book of collected poems by the Swansea-based poet and author Don Rodgers. I wrote to him when I was 17, saying I wanted to be a writer, and he kindly wrote back including a copy of his book.
I still have his letter somewhere. I recall he said: “Most bookshops incorrectly title it as ‘Mountain’, but it serves me right for having chosen such an obscure name, I suppose.”
And in charting my own progress towards a possible book: I’m hoping at least once every two months to publish a chapter-length piece about a figure from economic history and how their work relates to the present day.
The first of these was Thorstein Veblen in The Case Against Bitcoin, published on 12 March 2024.
Next up is William Playfair.
After that, on the list to investigate are
The 17th century statistician and self-promoter William Petty, who is credited with inventing the forerunner to GDP. Depending on who you believe, he was either “frivolous, grasping and unprincipled” (Karl Marx) or “the most rational man in England” (Samuel Peyps).
Philip Burlamachi, who created the first concept of a central bank, after being burned by a king’s bad debt.
There will be many more.
A huge series of commitments here. Looking forward to reading them, (especially the story of Playfair) and above all listening to the podcast.